| Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty Contributor(s): Koopman, Colin (Author) |
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ISBN: 0231148755 ISBN-13: 9780231148757 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $28.71 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: November 2015 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Movements - Pragmatism - Philosophy | Ethics & Moral Philosophy |
| Dewey: 144.3 |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.9" W x 8.9" (0.90 lbs) 290 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. |
Contributor Bio(s): Koopman, Colin: - Colin Koopman (PhD, Philosophy, McMaster) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Robert F. and Evelyn Nelson Wulf Professor of Humanities at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Pragmatism in Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (Columbia, 2009) and Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Indiana, 2013) and the coeditor (with Mike Sandbothe and Alexander Groschner) of Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics (Bloomsbury, 2013); he has published articles in Critical Inquiry, Constellations, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Metaphilosophy, The Review of Metaphysics, The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Contemporary Pragmatism, Foucault Studies, History of the Human Sciences, and elsewhere. |
